africahttp://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress
Lee Jones's BlogSat, 24 Mar 2018 17:43:22 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.3Monocle 24 appearance, 13 November 2013http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=862
http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=862#respondThu, 14 Nov 2013 12:49:50 +0000http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=862I appeared on Monocle 24 to discuss the communique of the 3rd plenum of the 18th congress of the Chinese Communist Party, which was widely anticipated to herald a new era of intense reform, but disappointed many. You can hear the show here; I come in at about 7mins.

]]>http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?feed=rss2&p=8620Thoughts on the BOI 2007http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=584
http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=584#commentsMon, 29 Oct 2007 19:04:00 +0000http://leejones.tk/blog/?p=235The 2007 Battle of Ideas was a very successful event, better than 2006 because the streams and topics were better selected and the festival seemed to attract a wider range of people, both as panellists and as audience members. My session seemed to go down very well. Initially I was worried there might not be enough people, or that there’d be too much consensus, but eventually a series of Student Unionites emerged from the woodwork so a good debate ensued. Here is the speech I gave, though I ad libbed a bit as well. Also, my Battle in Print on the Iraq War was selected by the Times in its ‘Web Grab’ column which selects the best op-ed pieces online, in its BOI special, which was a pleasant surprise. The session on Iraq was pretty good with quite a wide range of views expressed, which made for a good, genuine debate. There are always one or two loons at these things and one made himself known immediately by declaring himself in favour of the war on the grounds that Saddam might have had nuclear weapons and various other things – which made you wonder whether the last five years had happened at all. Another nutcase popped up at a debate on immigration and said something very similar to: “I don’t know why we’re talking about immigration when we don’t have enough water for our own population – we need to reduce the population to 30 million, but to do it in a nice way”. I shouted: “you first”.

There were, however, some good points made and I thought I’d just pick a few out…

Immigration:

On the two recent reports that emerged, one saying that immigrants contributed £6bn to the UK economy and one saying they are putting public services under strain, one audience member made a killer point: this means that immigrants are effectively being ripped off by the British state – contributing productivity and tax while getting sub-standard service provision in return. Philippe LeGrain, author of Immigrants: Why Your Country Needs Them was very impressive (despite his monotonous voice), and made some really good points. One is that the method of calculation used to generate the £6bn figure was just poor: all it basically said was ‘more people = more growth’. Actually, because of the social nature of productivity and work, it’s never as simple as just measuring the output of the immigrants themselves; you need to take the social effects into consideration. E.g., a Polish nanny not only earns a wage, but allows a British doctor to return to work, who then helps to cure people’s ailments and improve their productivity; immigrants not only produce but consume, i.e., they boost demand and thus create jobs for others. Also, he pointed out that the government’s ‘points’ system is stupid: governments simply cannot predict who the economy will need or who will make a useful contribution to society. History is replete with examples of unskilled or semi-skilled immigrants launching successful businesses, inventing new products or simply bringing up children who go on to make huge contributions to society.

Terrorism: Frank Furedi launched his new book, Invitation to Terror, which sounds like it contains interesting insights. One point he made was that while terrorism can destroy physical and human capital, it often has the indirect effect of creating human capital, i.e., rather than the mass panic and selfishness expected by elites, people react to adversity with solidarity and kindness (this was drawn from personal testimony of a 7/7 survivor, and reinforced by further such testimony from the floor), becoming more human in the process. This struck me as intuitively right, although of course this only applies to context of limited terror; where suicide bombings, etc, are a daily occurrence (e.g., Iraq), this does appear to create social rifts. Nonetheless, what struck me was that the social capital created by terror in the West is often directly undermined by elites’ interventions. E.g., in the UK, following the attempted terrorist attacks in Glasgow recently, the government issued calls for restraint in the clear expectation that anti-Muslim violence would ensue; in fact, no such thing happened and nor does it happen generally. But by stoking the fear of Islamophobia, we are encouraged to think the worst of each other and Muslims’ sense of otherness is reinforced. Likewise in the US, in the wake of 9/11 the population spontaneously organised itself to donate blood, give money to support groups, etc. The government’s response was to demobilise the people by telling them to “go shopping more”.

Africa: one person I found very impressive at the Battle for Africa strand was ‘Dapo Oyewole from Nigeria, Executive Director of the Centre for African Policy and Peace Strategy. Highly intelligent, humane and critical – definitely someone worth keeping an eye out for. Conversely, the less said about Paul Collier, the better.